VURT: THE TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAME (A REVIEW)

THEY SAY IF YOU DREAM OF FEATHERS it indicates a desire to ascend, to reach up to a higher plane of being or consciousness.  Indigenous peoples, like the Native Americans, saw them as keys to the spirit world, symbols of power and freedom and wisdom.  The ancient Egyptians weighed their hearts against feathers, facing salvation or damnation in the next life.  And then there was the strange case of Somerset, England, 1878.  Workers found a hidden room while demolishing an old house.  Completely inaccessible, without widow or door, it contained six brooms, an armchair, and a knotted cord with feathers woven into it.  People whispered it was the room of a witch; the chair was for resting, the brooms for flying, and the feathers were for casting spells.

All these legends are true. All of these people were dealing with the Vurt.   They sensed the greater Univurt.  It spoke to them.  They went to the Vurt world in dreams and sometimes in those dreams there were feathers.  Blue and Pink, Yellow and Black, rarely terrifyingly Silver.  

But I am getting all ahead of myself.  Let's take it slow.

Vurt: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game is a sumptuous, sexy tome full of hallucinogenic art, haunting dreams, and colored feathers.  Based on Jeff Noon's award winning series of novels, this 420+ page volume is a cyberpunk setting powered by Monte Cook's Cypher System.  We are well past the point, kittlings, where I get give you an elevator pitch for the game; first-gen RPGs were easy that way, emulating a genre like High Fantasy, Space Opera, or the Old West.  Second-gen games were all about the mixing.  High Fantasy Meets Cyberpunk.  Horror Meets Spies.  But games today, like Floats and Spanners and Squids (oops, getting ahead of myself again) are all genetic soup.  They are weirder and wider and wilder.  Vurt is very much that.  Basically, it's like Michael Moorcock at his most extreme.  Think TORG on psilopsyban or RIFTS with an LSD chaser.  In more prosaic terms, Vurt is very much your standard cyberpunk--megacorporations run a highly polarized society of wealthy elites and desperate masses, and technology introduces transhumanist questions--but in Vurt, the genre concept of virtual reality is front and center.  If standard cyberpunk blurs the lines between Man and Machine, Vurt blurs them between the Virtual and Reality.

Some background;

A long time ago and through most of history people thought dreams were just that...dreams.  They didn't know dreams constituted a whole liquid universe next door that our brains shaped and molded like clay.  They didn't know we were peopling an entire cosmos with Santas and Hamlets and Zeuses.  They didn't know that some of the people on the receiving end of our shaping resented it.

But real it was, and around the end of World War II the first mathemagicians began to prove it.  These people began to see existence as pure numbers and their equations could do things to reality we hadn't seen before.  Basically, the discovery that Earth was just a single facet of a big, fucking, multidimensional Univurt rewrote the science books and allowed us to start doing things previously confined to science fiction.  Androids.  Ridiculously tall skyscrapers.  Hovercars.  Spaceships.  Reality had become a lot more plastic, and that's the kind of thing that is bound to lead to trouble.

A string of world-shaking disasters ensued, and the biggest of these was a plague of sterility that threatened the human race with one-generation-left extinction.  So some geniuses came up with Fecundity 10, a viral mathemagical fertility drug that basically turned people into insane nymphomaniacs and satyromaniacs.  Think the rabid zombie people in 28 Days Later that want to hump the shit out of you instead of kill you.  They didn't just screw people; they screwed animals and corpses and robots (later they screwed Vurt beings too), and because this drug guaranteed fertility, and the walls of reality were basically Jell-O...these unions were all fruitful.  After a few outbreaks of Fecundity 10 there isn't just a human race but 31 modes of being, for your basic Dogman to Robomanshadodogs, five separate categories of being all mixed up like a rubix cube no one has bothered solving.  

Oh but wait: you wanted to hear about the feathers.  Right.

So we'd known about the other side of the looking glass forever.  Humans have always dreamed, after all.  And the mathemagicians had us pressed up real close to the mirror, nearly humping our reflections.  But it was a girl named Celia Hobart who actually pulled an Alice and walked us through.  She's the one who came up with the feathers, see.

A Vurt feather is a mathemagical key to the Other Side.  Put the feather in your mouth and millions of tiny barbed neuromatocysts latch on to the back of your throat and access your nervous system.  Each feather is a program, a program that shapes part of the dream world and then plugs you into it.  Say goodnight Hollywood.  Bid adieu to TV.  Why watch a story when you can be a story?  Pop a perfectly safe and legal Blue feather (a "baby blue") in your mouth and then you are one of the Friends sitting in the Central Perk coffee shop quipping with your buds.  You are Han Solo piloting the Millennium Falcon.  You are Frodo bearing the ring.  You experience a full programmed dream, from start to finish, and best of all you can bring your friends.  Everyone pops the same programmed Blue and enjoys the ride together.  As mentioned, this is completely safe; your consciousness pops into a Vurt body made for you.  In Cypher System terms, whatever damage you take to your stat pools reverts back to the same levels you were at before you went into the dream.  It's the Vurtverse equivalent of a holodeck ride.

Less vanilla, but just as safe and just as legal, are the Pink feathers.  These babies are Vurtworld porn.  Flying solo?  Pop a Pink in your mouth and experience an orgy.  Are you and your partner feeling adventurous?  Spice up your sex life with feathers that make you and your partner look like your favorite athlete, rock star, or supermodel.

N0w--and understand this kittlings--with Blues and Pinks your mind gets settled in a nice cozy body made of Vurt stuff. You aren't you anymore, you are someone else.  Take a Blue to experience your favorite superhero movie and you are that superhero, with all his powers and abilities.  Disappointed with the equipment nature gave you?  Pop a Pink and you are the best endowed porn star around.  The feather dictates the form you take.  Also, with Blues and Pinks, you can jerk out of the feather anytime you please, coming back to the "real" world.  But where we are going next--the Blacks and the Yellows--that's a whole other game.

The Black feathers are illegal, and provide a much higher stakes thrill.  When you take one, you appear in the Vurtworld as yourself, in a dream body that is an exact copy of you.  This extends to the equipment you carry.  All your talents and abilities are your own.  For some featherheads, Blacks offer the chance to pit themselves against challenges not found in the meat and bone world.  Are you a martial artist who wants to prove she could kick Bruce Lee's ass?  Here's your chance.  Big game hunter bored with hunting lions in Africa?  Try tackling a dragon.  For other feather users Blacks offer darker thrills...more intense BDSM pleasures, the slick joy of killing with your own bare hands.  Whatever your kick there is a feather for it.  The drawback of the Black feather (some would call it a feature rather than a bug), is that whatever damage you suffer in the Vurt is likewise suffered by your waking world body.  And if you die in the Vurt, you die period.  Jerking out is also harder, requiring an Intellect roll against the feather's level.

Yellow feathers are the ultimate in risk.  Highly illegal, they are also highly prized.  The Yellows are full-on Through the Looking Glass, and come with consequences.

When you take a Yellow, you enter the Vurt so deeply that you cannot come back until the program in the feather is finished; there is no jerking out.  Like Blacks, whatever injuries you suffer are real, and dying is dying.  Unlike Blacks, Yellows have a nasty habit of pulling you all the way in.  In other words, your body can vanish from the waking world completely.  You are in the Vurt, equipment and all.  This doesn't just have repercussions for you, but for the world...because when something goes into the Vurt, something else must come out.  Using Yellows can therefore unleash Vurt creatures and beings into the world of flesh and bone, and some take up residence here.

In game terms, completing feathers provides XP.  Blues and Pinks offer 1 XP for a level 1-3 feather, and 2 XP for levels 4-6.  Blacks offer 3 XP for levels 1-3, and 4 XP for levels 4-6.  With Yellow feathers, the haul goes up to 5 XP and 6 XP.  

Since we brought up the rules, Vurt as mentioned runs on  Monte Cook's Cypher System, so if you have played it, or Numenera, or The Strange, you know the drill.  There are a few tweaks, however, to make the system fit the setting.  For example, the Descriptors have now been replaced with "Modes."  Remember when we talked about Fecundity 10?  Modes stem from that.  The reality-bending fertility drug that saved humans from extinction made it possible to breed with artificial lifeforms, animals, dream-beings from the Vurtworlds, and even the dead.  This created hybrids, and the hybrids in turn crossbred with each other.  Vurt gives you, then, 31 combinations of these "races" as Modes; you could be Pure Human or Pure Robo (artificial lifeforms capable of producing offspring), but you could also be a Dogman or Shadowman (half living half dead), A Robodogman or Shadowvurtdog, etc etc.  The names get eccentric, sounding like the types had been tossed in a blender, but they work pretty much like standard racial Descriptors, and once you have a sense of what each baseline Mode is like, it isn't too difficult to imagine what the combinations might play like.

Cypher System fans will recognize the Character Types--these are still the Explorer, the Speaker, and the Warrior.  The Adept has been refit into the Mathemagician, a numbers-crunching genius whose prowess with mathemagical equations allows the character to bend and sculpt reality.  In most respects this is the standard Adept, and players will recognize it right away.

The Foci, which are really the heart of Cypher characters, are all new and setting specific.  Maybe your character Can't be Mithered, Craves the Fix, Is a Lucky Bleeder or Top Gears.  There are around 30 new Foci, many of which could be adapted to any cyberpunk game and some suitable for whatever genre you like.  Each is customized for this setting, and helps players better understand the setting they are slipping into.

Vurt: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game is a slick, gorgeous product.  Both the PDF and the hardcover are chock full of  excellent, full-color art perfectly evocative of the hallucinogenic setting.  Both the dreamworlds of the Vurt and the meat and bone megacity of Manchester are detailed, with descriptions of the megacorps, histories of the setting, tons of write-up for adversaries, new cyphers, and even adventures.  Ravensdesk Games delivers on the high quality we have come to expect from Cypher System products and then some.  If you like cyberpunk, if you liked Lovecraft's Dreamlands, if you liked Shadowrun but would like to try a more "cyberpunk meets dark fantasy" instead of "high fantasy," Vurt deserves a place on your shelf.  Cypher fans will want it just for its new collection of Foci and ideas for running other cyberpunk settings.  Don't let not having read the books dissuade you...the book is an excellent introduction to Noon's world.

So there, kittling, is the feather.  It remains up to you to pop it into your mouth or not.

    

   

STAR TREK DISCOVERY: SOME THOUGHTS ON ESPISODES 1 AND 2

BEWARE, AHEAD IT IS DARK AND SPOILERY UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN THE FIRST TWO EPISODES

Star Trek returns to the small screen by becoming something it hasn't been in a long time...relevant.

YOUR IDEAS ON STAR TREK probably depend on where you started.  Take, "continuity," for example.  If you began with The Next Generation, or any of the shows in that era like Deep Space Nine or Voyager, continuity is probably something you expect.  These were shows, after all, that adhered to a strict writer's bible.  If you began with the original series, however, continuity is not a big deal.  Star Trek was a show that made everything up as it went along. Klingons changing appearance?  Been there, done that.  Somewhere between The Animated Series and The Motion Picture they sprouted their bony brow ridges and somehow fans managed to survive.  Compare this with the Internet lamentations about the new Klingon appearance in Discovery.  

Continuity is one thing, but maybe the biggest difference between old school fans and those who started with the spin offs is what you think Trek is "about."  If the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Trek is a program about a bright, utopian future, where mankind has left savagery behind, you probably started with TNG.  The original series was a lot messier, often darker, with a Federation that struggled towards high ideals but was still plagued by very relatable problems.  Indeed, if you started with this Star Trek, your impression of the show is probably not so much a rosy vision of the future, but rather a social commentary on the difficulties of the present.  This is territory where The Next Generation was far more reluctant to go.

The first Star Trek was on TV in the middle of the civil rights era, and it did not shy away from tackling the hot button social issues of its era.  Racism, sexism, the Cold War, it's all addressed right there in the composition of the bridge crew. Female officers worked right alongside the men, from the first "Number One" to Lt. Uhura.  There was an Asian pilot and a black officer.  There was a Russian on board that no one was trying to kill.  Of the issues of that day, racism was perhaps the most commonly addressed, in multiple ways.  Sarek and Amanda had a mixed marriage and biracial child; "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was a blatant tale of skin color and prejudice; the first interracial kiss on television between Kirk and Uhura was not shown in many southern states.  We could go on and on, but the point is original Star Trek was social commentary in the form of stories about the future.  It was a mirror turned back on its audience.  

Which brings me to Discovery.

That there was actual Internet outrage over the diversity of the new cast shows us how necessary it is for Discovery to turn that same mirror on the modern Star Trek audience.  We are not, as a society, as evolved as we thought.  Fortunately, Discovery doesn't shy away from this, and stands right up alongside Star Trek in confronting our most pressing social issues.  It is right in your face with it.

Of course there is diversity; the two senior officers are women, one Asian and one Black, and we will have the first openly gay couple on Trek played by gay actors.  But frankly we expect by now Star Trek to beat the drum for diversity.  Diversity is just assumed to be part of the genre package, and we know Trek will always champion it, despite the noise made by Internet trolls.  Fortunately Discovery goes much further and is more specific in wrestling our present demons.  Nor does it waste any time.  Right there in the first two minutes it jumps right in.     

Would-be Klingon messiah T'Kuvma opens the series with a  speech that could easily have been made by any of the "very fine people" who brought their tiki torches to Charlottesville over the summer.  It's a monologue that would roll off the tongues of any of Europe's far right.  It could easily show up on Trump's teleprompter.  What it amounts to is a call to arms, a struggle between "nationalism" and "globalism."  T'Kuvma is arguing that traditional values of the Klingon Empire are under threat by a cosmopolitan coalition of diverse cultures (the Federation), that his people should reject diversity and "remain Klingon."  Embracing what the Federation represents would be "losing purity" awash in the "muck" of mixed races and cultures.  The Klingons must protect their uniqueness and their "heritage." 

This new Star Trek ain't playing around.  

And in First Officer Michael Burnham, we are thrown the second major curve ball to deal with.  "Where is the line," her story demands of us, "between mutiny/treason and doing the right thing?"  When does conscience and best intentions trump the letter of the law?

We can argue with her decision to run around Captain Georgiou and seize control of the ship, but in the wake of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, of whistleblowers and the near constant leaks of information from the White House, this is an issue that the original Star Trek would have taken on too.  Sometimes, if you believe in a course of action powerfully enough, right or wrong you break the chain of command.  "I thought saving your lives was more important than the principles of the Federation," Burnham tells us.  No, this is probably not something Will Riker would have done, but need I remind fans out there it is exactly something that Spock did.  To Kirk.  To bring his previous captain to Talos IV.  Maybe it all has something to do with the way Sarek is raising his kids?

It is too soon to tell where all this is going, but I found "The Vulcan Hello" and "Battle at the Binary Stars" a welcome return to classic Trek, not just in the old school swoosh sound effect of the doors or the beeps and whoops on the bridge, but in the challenging spirit of it.  Yes, this is a very modern Trek, with Abram's Kelvin Timeline effects, dizzying shots, and lots of movement--the entire thing looks like a big budget film--but it doesn't feel anything like the cinematic reboots.  It doesn't feel much like The Next Generation either.  It feels like a Trek ready to get its hands dirty again, a Trek ready to make us uncomfortable and to make us think.  Will it follow through on these difficult issues?  We have to wait and see.  

But I can't wait to see where it goes next.

  

  

        

LAMENTATIONS OF THE FLAME PRINCESS WEIRD FANTASY ROLE-PLAYING; A Much Belated Look

IF YOU WERE, like me, a second generation Dungeons & Dragons player (by which I mean you started with John Eric Holmes' 1977 blue boxed set rather than the original 1974 game), then you were probably one of the nerdy kids in the beginning of E.T. (or more recently Netflix's Stranger Things).  You were likely a boy (though my little 6th grade gaming group included *gasp* two girls), bookish--or worse comic bookish--with an overdose of imagination, and hovering right there on the precarious edge of adolescence.  To you, the original D&D was something the "big kids" or possibly even the adults did.  You snuck glimpses of Greyhawk and Eldritch Wizardry the same way you did your older brother's back issues of Heavy Metal under his bed or your dad's Playboys hidden in the closet.  They were something enticing and dangerous that you didn't fully understand.

Eldritch Wizardry

You see, the original 1974 game was written for adults; it was meant for wargamers with weird fiction leanings, not daydreaming eleven-year-olds.  It caught on first with the highly experimental 1970s college crowd, and in their hands took on heady overtones of sex and drugs and post-Vietnam PTSD before eventually trickling down to us.  But the '77 Blue Box began a long process of sanitising all that, making it safe for the kiddies.  Editor Holmes was a professor of neurology and a child psychologist, and in his capable hands D&D became something to stimulate developing imaginations.  That was where I first found it, in the Gifted and Talented Education classes my school stuck me in.  Unlike the early issues of Dragon magazine, there was no nudity, profanity, or adult elements in its pages.  Don't get me wrong, Blue Box was thrilling.  There were dragons and wraiths, goblins and pit traps, but the older edition had the scantily clad warrior ladies, the nude sacrifices, and demons that hinted at dangers of an altogether different kind.

The Child-Friendly Blue Box 

'77, of course, also happened to be the year geekdom was forever transformed by something called Star Wars, and this pretty much drove the stake through the heart of D&D's darker, weirder overtones.  From there on in every edition of D&D was going to be good versus evil, black against white, with epic heroes and lots of action scenes.  First it went more Tolkien than Howard, eventually jettisoning even Tolkien's moral complexity for Dragonlance.  And when the reactionary and deeply paranoid 80s rolled around, D&D was forced to get even more squeaky clean in response to witch hunters like Jack Chick and MADD who themselves were so incapable of separating fantasy from reality that they assumed D&D player's couldn't either.  In response, terms like "gods," "demons, and "devils" (anything that might offend the Inquisition) were changed to "powers," "tanar'ri," and "baatezu" respectively, and the 1989 Writer's Guidelines for Dragon magazine expressly forbade "profanity, graphic violence or sexual activity, or any other adult topics."  Any elements that could possibly have made D&D "weird" rather than "fantastic" was cast out into the void.

20 years later, an American expatriate living in Finland decided to go looking for them.   

Now before I set someone off (and Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy Role-Playing has a history of setting people off) I am not saying author James Raggi faithfully recreated old school D&D.  What I am saying is that he managed to capture the impression of it that existed in the minds of those of us who came to the game in the late 70s and 80s...that feeling that our Holmes and Moldvay sets were full of magic, but that the original set possessed a darker magic, a stronger sorcery that the adults had made forbidden to us.

What Raggi did was to re-imagine a D&D that rather than gradually downplaying and starving its weird elements, took the weird home, gave it a cozy place down in the basement to sleep, and fed the weird by luring the neighbouring kids home for it to eat.  Now it is grown into something Lovecraft would be proud of...

Let's cut to the chase; Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is what the title tells you it is.  "Weird fiction" as a term predates the modern "horror" and "fantasy" genres, and described stories that were macabre or unsettling.  "Weird Fantasy" then pretty much explains that what you are getting here is a fantasy game with dark, surreal, unnerving elements.  What Raggi did was to re-imagine a D&D that rather than gradually downplaying and starving its weird elements, took the weird home, gave it a cozy place down in the basement to sleep, and fed the weird by luring home the neighbouring kids for it to eat.  Now it is grown into something Lovecraft would be proud of.

What is this "Weird?"  Author James Raggi writes in the Referee Book;

The main thing that separates a Weird Tale from a conventional horror story is the forces completely out of the control of those who encounter them. A thing that cannot be explained, cannot be defeated, cannot be solved.

He goes on to point out this is easy to achieve in a piece of fiction, where the author has complete control, but poison to a successful roleplaying game, where players must have freedom to act as they will.  The trick then is to take that sense of overwhelming alienness, of hopelessness, of incomprehensible powers and load them into the game...then letting the player's respond to them without railroading.  Much of what makes Weird Fantasy work is tone.  Mechanically, it is little different from any old school B/X edition; the Weird comes from the grim tone of the writing, the sensational and shocking artwork, and the willingness to deal head on with graphic violence, sexuality, and the surreal.

Some reviewers have classified it as a "retro-clone."  It isn't.  Retro-clones appeared when D&D became the property of new publisher Wizards of the Coast, and in a marketing strategy to popularise their new version of the game but of the game's content was made public property.  The idea was that third party publishers would capitalise on the brand name to produce a whole slew of content for the new edition. The flip side of this was that those who were not enamoured with the new version, or who longed for previous, out-of-print editions, could use the open content material and "wed" it back to the earlier mechanics (mechanics cannot be copyrighted, only their artistic presentation).  So independent designers created "retro-clones" like Swords & Wizardry (a close imitation of original D&D) or Labyrinth Lord (a clone of the 80s Moldvay/Cook edition).  These games felt like, and played like, the originals.  James Raggi took advantage of the same realities that made retro-clones possible, but Weird Fantasy Role-Playing doesn't actually recreate any older edition.  Mechanically it is very close to original D&D, but it is very much its own game.

Something it did borrow from old school D&D is the gritty, "fantasy Vietnam" aspect.  Weird Fantasy Role-Playing is very much of the spirit of the original edition in that hit points are low, the world is lethal, and death comes very quickly.  It brings to mind the now-famous "Calithena" post to an old school D&D forum on Dragonsfoot and quoted by Rob MacDougall; 

“When you’re in an old-school dungeon you’re in @*%!ing VIETNAM. Check EVERYTHING. Clear out EVERYTHING. Don’t take ONE STEP MORE than you have to until you’re COMPLETELY SURE it’s clear. Check EVERYTHING for traps. Search EVERYTHING. … THE GM WILL USE IT TO @*%! YOU OVER. Be PROACTIVE: set traps and ambushes for the monsters before they do it to you. Find a position of tactical advantage and DUMP FIREBALLS, FLAMING OIL, AND BARRAGES OF ARROWS on your enemies. And even if you do everything right, you STILL might get screwed by wandering monsters.”

Be Careful What You Touch

This is very much the case in Weird Fantasy.  In many of the post-Star Wars editions of D&D, you could feel confident that you were the "hero" and would survive to see the credits roll.  Not so in Raggi's game.  Going into a dungeon is Hell and there are no assurances everyone is coming out intact.  Worse still, no-one is promising a good death, a heroic death, or even a meaningful death.  A careless mistake, a lack of caution, an overabundance of curiosity can easily get your character killed.

Added to this old school lethality is a heavy layer of grim. Weird Fantasy uses the four standard old school character classes (Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric and thief-like "Specialist") plus the optional racial classes (Elf, Dwarf, Halfling),  These are presented mechanically close to their D&D cousins, but considerably darkened.  Fighters are those who have been "willing to slaughter at another's command" and "immersed in the worthlessness of life."  They "have seen the cruelty of battle, have committed atrocities that in any just universe would damn them to Hell, and have survived."  Screw "fantasy Vietnam," that reads like "fantasy Apocalypse Now."

The Current Edition's "Rules & Magic" Book

Magic-Users, meanwhile, do not cower from the supernatural like sane and normal people, but instead "revel" in its "darkness."  "They see the forces of magic as a new frontier to explore, a new tool for the attainment of power and knowledge.  If it blackens the soul equal to that of any devil, is is but a small price to pay." Clerics are just as likely to be religious fanatics and witch hunters as beneficent healers, and Specialists (the rogues or thieves) are "inspired by greed, boredom," and "idle curiosity" to risk "life and limb simply because a less active life is distasteful to them."  

The demihumans aren't treated with kid gloves either.  Dwarves are a "dying race" incapable of change and adaptation.  The world has moved on and their can't move with it.  Elves are creatures of Chaos, the magical Fae, who like Dwarves are fading and no longer belong in the world. 

Arguably none of this makes Weird Fantasy Role-Playing any different really from a game like Warhammer.  This isn't bright and shiny "high fantasy," its more of gritty real-life mind-set stuck into a fantasy world.  Where Raggi's game goes off on its own and really begins to (darkly) shine is its "weirdness."

...feelings of vulnerability and helplessness are important to Weird tales...knowledge equals power (and) familiarity equals boredom...destroy familiarity by not using, or subverting, cliche elements of game worlds or adventures...Players may show up expecting the usual six-ability-scores-with-classes game, with opponents taken out of a manual and treasure generated off a chart or a list.  Don't give it to them!

- James Raggi, "The Weird" 

One of the tools Weird Fantasy uses to achieve the uncertainty of the Weird is its utter lack of a bestiary.  There are no lists of goblins, hippogriffs, and trolls here.  Instead there are guidelines for creating your own, unique, monsters.  These are meant to be used sparingly; Raggi actively discourages conjuring up comfortable hordes of orcs for players to kill and recommends replacing them with human adversaries instead.  Humanoids are, after all, the safe and tidy "high fantasy" answer to giving the players something to fight while simultaneously skirting around the whole "murder" issue.  Weird Fantasy rubs your face in it.  Fighting animals can be used for spice, but monsters--real monsters--should be used sparingly.  They are horrors and aberrations that challenge the nerve and sanity as much as battle prowess. 

From "The God That Crawls" Adventure

In addition to the adversaries, the supernatural wielded by player characters was made darker and weirder too.  While the Cleric and Magic-User spell systems operate just like old school D&D, and many of the spell names read the same, they have been extensively rewritten to give them an eerie, eldritch feel.  New spells have been added, like the spectacular "Summon," which allows the creation of a random horror right then and there.  This is consistent with the game's overall approach to the supernatural as something alien, intrusive, and corrupting.

The overall effect is the creation of a gritty, old school D&D game suited perfectly to more surreal settings and horrifying adventures.  This is a game of atmosphere and mood, more Call of Cthulhu than Dungeons & Dragons 3, 3.5, 4, or 5e.  As we shall see in upcoming reviews, this has generated a lot of support for the game, with darker and more horrifying scenarios and supplements than we have seen for fantasy roleplaying in a long time.  It gives Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing that freshness, that awe, that chill old school D&D delivered when we were kids first exposed to it, an manifests that "eldritch, primordial" D&D we imagined we had missed.  If you are looking to feel twelve again, playing D&D in the darkened basement, heart pounding as your character turns every corner, this game might be for you.  

CAROLE SATYAMURTI'S "MAHABHARATA," A REVIEW

Despite the availability of various versions of the Mahabharata, on page, screen, and in live performance, I am assuming that it will be less familiar to the average American or European reader than the Iliad or the Aeneid, for instance. I have seen my task as one of trying to open the reader's eyes--as my own were opened--to the richness of a literary masterpiece they may hardly have heard of until now...

Carole Satyamurti, from her Preface

FIFTEEN TIMES THE LENGTH OF THE BIBLE, the Mahabharata is a sprawling saga of gods and mortals, demons and monsters, comedy and tragedy. It is the story of Kuruksetra, a cosmological war that ended the previous Golden Age and gave rise to our Age, the fallen Kali Yuga. On on side, divine beings incarnated in mortal form as Lord Krishna and the five Pandava brothers. On the other, demonic powers incarnated as Duryodhana and his ninety-nine Kaurava brothers. Disguised as a dynastic struggle between human cousins, it is actually a fight for the destiny of the Earth.

Composed around two thousand years ago, but with an oral tradition stretching back a millennium before that, the Mahabhrata is as familiar to the people of India and South Asia as the stories of Adam and Eve or Moses and Pharoah are to most Westerners. Usually compared to the Iliad and Odyssey, it certainly shares much in common with them; Sanskrit and classical Greek are close cousins, with vocabulary and grammatical structures strikingly similar. Both descend from an earlier Indo-European ancestor, and it is easy to see the linguistic and thematic relations between Greek and Vedic mythologies (a clear example is the god Uranus and the god Varuna, both lords of the night sky). But the Mahabhrata differs sharply from its classical Greek cousins in that for hundreds of millions it remains a religious scripture, and enjoys a position in Indian culture that is more Biblical than Homeric. The Bhaghavad Gita, the section Westerners are most likely to have heard of, is still a source of moral, ethical, and spiritual teachings to many on the subcontinent, and indeed has inspired people far beyond. Because it is such a significant text, people have been attempting English translations since the 19th century. The best known is probably KM Ganguli's, but despite being the most complete translation in English, its stilted Victorian prose is nearly as alien to modern readers as the Sanskrit. Several others, among them William Buck, R.K. Naryan, and C. Rajagopalachari, have published condensed versions also in prose. All seem to be missing something.

The problem seems to be that its very heart, the Mahabharata is a poem. Traditionally, audiences would have experienced it in song or chant (indeed Bhaghavad Gita means "the song of God"). The English retellings, concentrating on making it clear and comprehensible for modern audiences, have generally ignored this, opting for prose instead. This isn't necessarily a bad decision; any attempt to directly imitate the metrical form of the shlokas (the stanzas used in classical Sanskrit literature) in English would sound jarring anyway. But undeniably something is lost by changing it to prose, and these Mahabhratas all seem drier and dustier for it. So while there are certainly good translations to be had in terms of accuracy and keeping alive the stories, no one has really been able to make the epic sing in English as it must have sung to its audiences so very long ago.

No one until Carole Satyamurti, that is.

Mahabhrata, a Modern Retelling is glorious, and like so many brilliant ideas you are dumbfounded no one ever got around to thinking of it before. It starts with the realization that retelling the Mahabharata isn't a job for scholars, it's work that requires a poet. Satyamurti, an award-winning poet with several published collections under her belt, comes at the work not as a Sanskritist would--primarily concerned with hewing close to the original language--but as an artist who paints pictures with English verse. Since she does not, by her own admission, read Sanskrit, she allows herself to trust the most respected translations of those who do, soaking them up and respinning them in a way that sings to the English ear. The result is the Mahabharata I first longed for twenty years ago, when I read it in Sanskrit, and desperately wanted to share it with my English-speaking friends and family. It's the retelling you can hand to English speakers and say "this is why it has been loved for two thousand years."

This is no mean feat. Satyamurti has distilled 100,000 Sanskrit shloka couplets into 27,000 lines of English blank verse, keeping the structure of the original 18 books largely intact. Her choice of blank verse, with nine to eleven syllables per line and an average of five stresses, is perfect. The Sanskrit shloka, consisting of 32 syllables in two 16 syllable lines, was a widespread and well known form in ancient and classical India, just as blank verse--the meter of Shakespeare's plays and Milton's Paradise Lost--is for modern English speakers. Reading Mahabharata in this form is a subconscious cue that we are reading a classic.

It is also vibrant. With all due respect to Ganguli, his 5000 page retelling is often numbingly dull to even devoted Sanskritists and scholars. Satyamurti's poem by contrast is nearly impossible to put down, racing through the massive storyline with lithe, economical verse. On the crucial scenes she slows to focus attention, then picking up pace to speed through the less vital sections of the narrative. In addition to her story-telling skills her sense of character is pitch-perfect. Each of the twenty four or so principal figures she portrays in all their multiple dimensions, and the secondary characters are consistently distinct and memorable. This is the work of an artist just as devoted to her craft as she clearly is the Mahabharata, and the fact that this is a retelling should never detract from the fact that Satyamurti has composed one of the longest narrative poems In English history, and is it masterful.

I simply cannot recommend this retelling enough.

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KULT: A Review of the Third Edition

An Enigmatic Game

“Play me,” it whispers. “I dare you.”

Kult: Beyond the Veil is a 304 page Rorschach blot, a game so cryptic and so vast that it can be almost anything you want it to be. Like Nietzche’s Abyss, when you stare into the book, you get the uncomfortable feeling it’s staring back into you. If you want Kult to be a game about paranormal investigators struggling against supernatural forces, it is. If you want it to be about cultists and sorcerers delving into dark secrets to turn themselves into gods, the game is happy to oblige. Or how about a game in which the players are monsters struggling against their own dark urges? Kult will be that too. It will be traditional Gothic, it will be brooding psychological horror, it will be post-modern Clive Barker hideousness. Like Mephistopheles it will give you anything you want just so long as you turn yourself over to it. “Play me,” it whispers. “I dare you.”

I suppose you could call it a game of generic horror, but there’s nothing generic about it. This is a game with one of the strongest personalities I have ever seen. Kult might better be described as an intricate, elaborate setting in which any horror imaginable might rear its ugly head. Vampires, Lovecraftian gods, Cenobites, fallen angels, animated killer dolls; the setting offers a rationale for them all. To my mind, this is a remarkable achievement, but it might be disconcerting to players who read the book and have no indication what to do with it. Hopefully, this review will help a little with that, because if you like horror, you need to play this game.

Editions

Despite a fanatical (dare I say “cult”) following, Kult never caught on all that well in the United States. A Swedish game, the English translations of Kult went through three editions and a short-lived card game, but each quickly lapsed out of print. While this is not exactly a bad thing, considering the high turn-over of games and companies in this industry, a game of Kult’s caliber deserved better. The problem may be, in part, that the game wasn’t even sure how to define itself.

The first, Target/Metropolis edition, for example, seemed to lean towards “Splatter Horror.” It was gun heavy, with detailed descriptions and drawings of weapons. The combat system was longer and more complex, and martial arts were heavily detailed. The overall feel was one of gore. The second edition was a radical reinvention. The combat and skill systems were greatly simplified, and the long weapons lists trimmed. The new focus was on “Psychological Horror,” as evidenced by the remarkable new cover. While the first edition had a naked crucified angel, the second featured stark, black and white silhouettes showing a man losing his mind. But where the second edition truly shined was the deeper attention given to the setting of the game, and a strong new focus on the occult. The new edition was more Hellblazer than Hellraiser.

The First and Second Edition Covers

The third edition, Kult: Beyond the Veil, followed the course set by the second edition. Since it is this edition which will be reviewed here, not much needs to be said at the moment. The third is, frankly, the finest of the editions, and the first to present the complete magic system (originally released in two separate sourcebooks to the second edition). This inclusion shifts the focus again, making the new Kult more a game of “Occult Horror.” This is, perhaps, where the game feels most at home. Magic is an integral part of the setting, and the hidden reality foundation of the game resonates powerfully with occult themes. This is not to say the game excludes psychotic slashers or mad scientists, but the heart of the game is of dark secrets and otherworldly terrors.

Called the Demiurge, he banished his peers from the Metropolis and imprisoned mankind in an Illusion…the world we live in now. 

Reality, As We Know It, Is A Lie

This first line from the back cover summarizes the entire setting of the game. Once, ages past, humanity was a race of gods, building for themselves a cyclopean, impossible city known as the Metropolis. Somehow, one of their number seized power and rose against all the others. Called the Demiurge, he banished his peers from the Metropolis and imprisoned mankind in an Illusion…the world we live in now. He forged Passion to make us slaves of the flesh, Time and Space to make us feel small and finite, Madness to limit our genius, and Dreams to turn us inward, away from discovering the truth. His supreme invention was Death, or at least the illusion of it. Though we are all immortal, after a span of time in the world we are yanked out and dragged off to Inferno, or Hell. There, under the auspices of the Demiurge’s lieutenant, Astaroth (Lucifer, Satan), we are hideously tortured until all memories of our lives are gouged from our minds. The slate wiped clean, we are reduced to infants and reincarnated in the womb to go through the cycle again. The point of all this is to limit us, to ensure we never had enough time to Awaken and reclaim our innate divinity.

Kult assumes that the Gnostics—a collective term for religious sects who believed the Creator God of the Bible was a jealous imposter—were right all along. 

This system worked well for millennia, until it all started to go wrong. Sometime around the 16th century, the Illusion began to break down, growing thin and threadbare. Sprawling cities—intrusions of Metropolis into our space-time—began to spread. By the end of the first World War, the Demiurge had vanished, his citadel locked and barred, the angels serving him expelled. No one knows exactly what happened, but in the aftermath, all hell has broken loose…literally. The Archons—quasi divine beings who helped the Demiurge enslave mankind—started fighting amongst each other for the throne, while Astaroth up and left Hell. All manner of beings from Outside started crossing over into the Illusion. And yet, for mankind itself, all this presented the best chance ever to escape imprisonment and reclaim our birthright.

All this background isn’t exactly new; actually, it’s two thousand years old. Kult assumes that the Gnostics—a collective term for religious sects who believed the Creator God of the Bible was a jealous imposter—were right all along. But while Kult does draw on historical heresies and occult traditions to provide a foundation for its setting, it works very hard to build upon these things with elaborate new fictions. Much of the book is devoted to describing the empty, haunted ruins of the Metropolis, the pits of Inferno, and many other hideous otherworlds. The inhabitants of each are also described. And all this is fresh from the author's fevered imaginations, not merely rehashed from old myths and legends.

The Captivity of Man (Character Creation & System)

Character creation in Kult is only a moderately complex affair, and the designers of the 3rd edition offer two variant systems to speed you through it. We’ll assume here—for simplicity’s sake—that we are talking about the creation of ordinary, human, characters. Later, I’ll discuss the rules for magicians and monsters.

The chapter starts with nine “Archetypes,” descriptive collections of personality traits and Advantage/Disadvantage guidelines. There are not character classes, and frankly you can ignore them if you already have an idea of what you want to play.

After these, there are eight Abilities—Agility, Strength, Constitution, Comeliness, Ego, Charisma, Perception, and Education—rated on a scale of 1 (terrible) to 20 (great). In standard character creation, you have 100 points to distribute amongst them. This is on a 1 for 1 basis (an Education of 15 costs 15 points) unless you want to purchase an ability rating above 18. At that point, the cost is 3 for 1 point of ability. In the simplified character creation method, you just roll 2d10 for each.

Skills are each based on a particular ability. “Basic Skills,” those anyone can reasonably expect to perform, all come with an automatic rating of 3. Some others have specific prerequisites (“Academic Skills” require a minimum Education rating of 13). In the standard system, you get 150 points to spend on each skill, again on a 1 for 1 basis. The catch here is that a skill rating is limited by the value of its controlling ability. Once the skill exceeds this, the cost jumps to 3 points for 1 point of skill. For example: Parapsychology is an Ego-based skill. If the character’s Ego is 16, it would cost 16 points to buy Parapsychology 16. Parapsychology 18 would cost 22 points (16 6 points for the two additional points above the Ego rating).

In simplified character creation, you simply chose 2 skills at 18, 2 at 15, and 8 at 10.

The game system is very simple. Actions are resolved by a single d20 roll. If you roll under your skill or ability score, you succeed. The wider the margin between your roll and the score, the better you succeed. A 1 is a success and adds 10 to your success margin, while a 20 is always a failure. Naturally, circumstances can increase or decrease your base chance of success.

Beyond Madness (Advantages, Disadvantages, & Mental Balance)

One aspect of character creation deserves to be singled out; the selection of Advantages and Disadvantages. The way Kult deals with these is unique, and goes to the heart of both the setting and the game.

The first thing one notices looking over these lists is that all the entries are mental, emotional, or social in nature. Physical (dis)advantages fall under the umbrella of high or low ability ratings, while matters of wealth and property are handled other ways in the game. The advantages and disadvantages of Kult all revolve around one’s mental state.

You may take any number of disadvantages you wish. These supply you with points you can spend on advantages or skills. Likewise, you may take as many advantages as you like, but if not balanced by disadvantage points, the costs are subtracted from your skill points. I could take, for example, both Greed ( 10) and Mathematical Talent (-10) and have no more or less skill points than the starting 150. If I took Greed only, I would start with 160 skill points. Mathematical Talent only would start me with 140.

As my balance becomes more extreme, I become more or less than human. At the very extreme ends, I shake off the illusion altogether and become a god once more.

What really matters, however, is the total number of advantage points versus disadvantage points. This value is used to determine the character’s “Mental Balance.” Following the example above, if I started the game with Greed only, my Mental Balance would be -10. If I started with Mathematical Talent, it would be 10. If I took both, my balance would be 0.

Why does this matter? Essentially, man’s captivity demands a Mental Balance near 0. As my balance becomes more extreme, I become more or less than human. At the very extreme ends ( 500 or -500), I shake off the illusion altogether and become a god once more.

As my Mental Balance increases, I start to radiate an aura which draws people to me, making them feel safe and comforted by my presence. Evil things shun me, and I become increasingly immune to fear and negative mental states. I begin to acquire miraculous powers. I am on the Light Road to my lost divinity.

As my mental balance decreases, I start to radiate an aura of fear and discomfort. Good things are repelled by me, and I become increasingly vulnerable to negative mental states. At extremely low levels, I start to go through physical changes, mutating into some sort of creature. My fears and subconscious urges might manifest as objective beings in the outside world. I start to gain monstrous powers. I am on the Dark Road to my lost divinity.

The beauty of this system is that it provides an explanation for the appearances of both monsters and saints. Vlad Tepes became so sick, so twisted, and so depraved that he mutated into a vampire. Siddhartha became so enlightened that he Awoke and shook off the coils of the illusion. Much of Kult depends on this mechanic, and we will be coming back to it again.

Beyond Humanity (Playing Monsters)

The Mental Balance system allows for player character monsters, and a separate chapter is included for those who wish to explore this option. Basically, lists of supernatural Limitations (like “Bloodthirst,” “Uncontrolled Shape Change,” and “Inhuman Appearance”) and Powers (like “Telekinesis,” “Invulnerable to Weapons,” and “Regeneration”) are provided. Each has a point cost, just like Advantages and Disadvantages. In this case, Limitations are taken to provide points for purchasing Powers. At the same time, however, the total value of Limitation points is subtracted from the character’s Mental Balance. In addition, even if the character has enough Advantages to raise the balance, no creature with Powers of this kind may have a Mental Balance of greater than -25. All Monsters are on the Dark Road, their dropping Mental Balances rendering them increasingly inhuman.

For example, a classic vampire might take the Limitations Bloodthirst (15), Tomb Bondage (10), Scared of Religious Symbols (10), and Sensitive to Sunlight (15). This gives him a total of 50 points. He uses these points to purchase Eternal Youth (10), Enhanced Senses (10), Increased Strength (15), and Invulnerable to Weapons (15). His Mental Balance is then lowered by the total number of Limitation points. Assuming the character started with a Mental Balance of -15, it would now be -65.

Mental Aspects

At times of extreme mental stress—seeing monsters, undergoing torture, being seriously wounded, etc—characters must make a roll against their Ego score, modified by circumstance. It is essentially the Kult equivalent of a Call of Cthulhu “sanity roll.” If you fail, you will go into “shock,” and suffer an appropriate reaction for 1d20 minutes. Reactions include “Screams,” “Faints,” and “Runs Away.”

There are a lot of systems out there to model states of mental distress. Call of Cthulhu and Unknown Armies are two beautiful examples. But the way in which Kult makes use of the character’s natural disadvantages is inspired...

If you have a positive Mental Balance, you can resist shock. At 15 or higher, instead of suffering a reaction, you may act freely with a -5 penalty to all rolls. At 30 or higher you can cancel even this with another successful Ego roll. As the scale goes higher and higher, you become completely immune to mental stress.

If you have a negative Mental Balance, bad things can occur. At -15, your Disadvantages get the better of you, and you must make a successful Ego check to resist them. For example, a character with Depression might complete give up, unable to act, consumed with self-loathing. A Rationalist might refuse to acknowledge what has happened, denying it exists. A Phobic character might suffer hallucinations related to his fear. And so on. The effects last until the character manages to shake them off with another Ego roll. However, the lower your Mental Balance, the less often you can make such checks, and the higher the penalty you take on each roll. At -75, well below the limit or mere insanity, shock can actually begin to provoke physical mutations, your humanity slowly slipping away.

As an added delight, any character who fails his initial Ego throw to resist shock by 10 or more will gain a new disadvantage appropriate to the situation that induced the shock. This doesn’t give you any points, it just lowers your Mental Balance.

There are a lot of systems out there to model states of mental distress. Call of Cthulhu and Unknown Armies are two beautiful examples. But the way in which Kult makes use of the character’s natural disadvantages is inspired, as is the notion that beneath even the level of clinical insanity worse things can happen.

Magicians cannot be normal people...

Magic & Occult Sciences

In the world of Kult, sorcerers may believe that their power comes from harnessing elemental forces, from calling upon spirits, demons, or gods, or even from some energy source like “mana” or “quintessence.” They are all wrong. Magic is a means by which innate human divinity is temporarily re-awakened, allowing the will to strain against the bars of its prison. In a ritual, the divine portion of the mage stirs in its sleep, flexing its muscles. As the Illusion is built from five aspects—Time/Space, Madness, Dreams, Passion, and Death—magic deals with manipulating those forces.

Magicians cannot be normal people. They must have Mental Balances either above 25 or below -25. This allows you to purchase Magical Intuition, an advantage costing 20 points. This allows you to see auras, sense magical energies, and perform effective rituals.

The magic system of Kult is mechanically quite simple, but it is one of the most elaborately described in gaming history. Furthermore, a large measure of it mirrors the practices of real-life occultists. Even a casual student of the occult would find much that was familiar in the game. For example, the spell “Protective Pentagram” is basically a complete description of the occult “Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram,” and it does in the game exactly what genuine occultists believe it does in real life (with a Kult twist). The result is something extremely atmospheric, though not, I imagine, to everyone’s taste.

Mechanics: there are five Lores of Magic, each wielding power over one of the aspects of the Illusion (a sixth Lore, the Dark Art, is possessed by beings from outside the Illusion). Lores are learned exactly like skills, and allow you to perform spells relating to that Lore. For example, the Lore of Passion allows you to study and perform spells like “Seduction,” “Arouse Instincts,” and “Master and Slave.” Each spell has a Skill Score, which is the minimum rating in the controlling Lore the magician must possess. To learn “Seduction,” the mage must have the Lore of Passion at 7 or higher. To learn “Master and Slave” it must be 14 or higher.

To cast a spell you make a roll under your spell skill score. Spells also have an Endurance cost, the amount of personal energy the magician must expend, as well as a time to cast. This can run from 1 hour to days for powerful and complex rituals. All the tools, preparations, procedures, incantations, and visualizations are painstakingly described for each and every spell.

The best way to give you the full flavor of the system is to completely quote a spell. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve selected one of the more “controversial” spells from the book (in that Kult’s realistic and detailed treatment of topics like “sex magic” often gives the game a bad rep).

Master and Slave (Kult, p. 147)

An individual is made to totally submit to the will of the Conjurer for the duration of the spell. A strong sexual connection is created between the Conjurer and the victim, where the victim is filled with a desire to be dominated. The submission has masochistic undertones, the victim is willing to be dominated and degraded. He looks upon anything the Conjurer commands him to do as part of a sexual game, even such things that result in the victim hurting himself and others. The victim will seek out the Conjurer if they know each other, otherwise he will submit to the Conjurer as soon as they meet.

Skill Score: 14

Loss of Endurance: 40

Tools of Magic: the wand

Time to Cast: 1 hour

Duration: 24 hours

Ego-Throw to Resist: Yes

Preparations: A strand of the hair of the victim is placed on the altar. All of the planetary signs are drawn around the inside of the Circle, and the names of the seven Chakras are written inside of these. A candle is lit in the middle of the Circle. The Conjurer paints the Chakras with red paint on his own body, in the shape of stylized roses or lotus flowers.

Invocation and Gestures: With wand in hand the Conjurer calls the victim by name and commands him to come. He swears by Gamaliel and by each of the Chakras while he touches the flowers on his body, feeling the snake rising up along his spine. Sitting on his haunches by the burning candle he summons Mars and Venus, Saturn and Luna. Finally, he takes the hair from the altar and burns it on the candle while he commands the victim to give up his will and submit. Visualization: The Conjurer sees how the victim is taking shape in the burning flame in the middle of the Circle, nude and initially reluctant, then more and more submissive. When the Conjurer is burning the hair the victim falls on its knees and starts licking the feet and genitals of the Conjurer.

Aside from five Lores of Magic, there are also seven Occult Sciences. These are skills (again, based on real-life disciplines but all retooled for the setting) which give characters knowledge of the Illusion and how to escape it. “Kabbalah” is a detailed study of the Demiurge and his Archons. “Alchemy” examines the substances which are the building blocks of our prison. “Astrology” uncovers the blueprints and plan by which the Illusion works. “Numerology” examines the Illusion as an equation. “Symbolism” underlies magic and the path to awakening our inner divinity. “Tarot” is a meditative art that gets the user in touch with his inner being. And “Voodoo,” the youngest science, explains how to cheat death.

Summarizing as I have just done does not do justice to the incredible richness of detail used to flesh out each. The same attention Kult lavishes on its spells is continued here. The section on Tarot, for example, gives a history of the cards in the Kult universe, as well as the divinatory meanings for each and every one. This is purely for atmosphere; the mechanics governing how to use the Tarot in game are actually much more succinct. It is this remarkable attention to detail that gives the game its richness.

On a side note, entities from beyond the Illusion have access to another form of magic, the “Dark Art.” While the Dark Art cannot directly affect the prisoners inside the illusion, it does allow them to reshape the illusion itself. For example, an Azghoul (ancient servants of Man left abandoned in the empty streets of Metropolis to fend for themselves) is hunting victims in the streets of New York. The hapless couple turns into an alleyway. The Azghoul can then use the Dark Art to reshape the alley...into a dead end.

Combat

Compared to the elaborate magic system, Kult's combat mechanics are much more straightforward, reflecting the design choices of the game.

Combat is divided into rounds. All (human) characters start with 2 actions per round, but can attain (via high levels of Agility) up to 4. Supernatural entities may have even more than that.

To determine initiative, each round the participants roll a d20 and add the result to their initiative score; actions are taken in order of highest total to lowest, repeating the cycle until everyone has exhausted their actions.

To attack, roll d20 and compare the result to your skill score (which may be modified by circumstances). Rolling over that number constitutes a failure. If you roll under, keep track of the number of points you succeed by. This is your “Hit Score,” and it is vital for determining damage.

The roll of a “1” is, incidentally, a perfect hit, adding an automatic 10 to the Hit Score. A roll of “20” is a fumble and a failure, allowing the GM to determine what sort of mishap befalls the character.

Every weapon has a damage rating, or “Damage Effect Factor” (DEF). The Hit Score modifies this number up or down. A Hit Score of 0-2, for example, lowers the DEF (I merely grazed the target) while anything about a 7 raises it (up to a maximum of 5). Thus a single roll resolves both hitting and your damage total.

Damage is rated in wounds—Scratch, Light Wound, Serious Wound, Fatal Wound, etc. Different characters and beings are able to withstand different numbers of each, and the wounds are cumulative.

There are, beyond this, rules for all sorts of combat situations, including armor, parrying melee attacks, fighting in darkness, poisons, infections, and so forth. It is a simple system, but deadly, and with enough detail to generate all manner of life-threatening encounters. But comparing the page count of the Combat chapter (12 pages) with that of, say Magic (90 pages) gives you a clear indication of the game's focus.

Why You Should Be Playing This Game

taboo (also tabu) noun ( pl. -boos also -bus) a social or religious custom prohibiting or restricting a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place, or thing

Some of the most intense horror experiences come from the transgression of taboo. Certainly, an ax-wielding maniac is frightening, but when Jack Torrance stalks his own wife and child through the empty halls of the Overlook Hotel, he is violating everything society expects a father to stand for. Psycho's infamous shower scene features a violent murder, but it becomes even more transgressive by the fact that it occurs in a place society defines as a citadel of privacy (not to mention the fact that Norman Bates is dressed in his mother's clothes). And vampires, bless their dead little hearts, get endless mileage out of violating of sexual taboos (rape, S&M, and incest being common features of the genre). While it is scary (and thus thrilling) to be put in danger, what distinguishes horror from adventure or fantasy fiction is this aura of violation, of horror's willingness to assault whatever our societies hold to be sacred.

Compared to literature or cinema, horror RPGs have shown an extreme reluctance to violate taboo, and thus content themselves with providing a “scare.” Most take the safer route of embracing the cliches of adventure fiction—hunt the monster, solve the mystery, defeat the cultists—sprinkled with borrowed horror elements. But there is nothing visceral in this, and while you might feel a few chills, it's unlikely you'll really squirm.

Kult is willing to go where most other games are not. Deviant sexuality, blasphemous ideas, torture; it's all there and more. Anything that might make you uncomfortable, you can probably find somewhere between the covers of this book. Indeed, deviancy and taboo violation are the very heart of the game, when one considers that societal taboos were put in place by the Demiurge to keep us safe, normal, and jailed.

This is not to say you can't get there with other games. Despite the intellectual, outre horror of Call of Cthulhu (with its non-Euclidean angles and unfathomable gulfs), entities like ghouls or deep ones do hit below the belt. The difference is, the core game itself takes a genteel approach to horror, while Kult takes you by the hand and drags you through the extremes.

If you are looking for a game inclined towards deep horror, the horror of Stephen King, Clive Barker, or Thomas Ligotti, Kult is for you.

Why You Should NOT Be Playing This Game

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with B-movie horror, or the action horror of films like Van Helsing or Blade. And while horror is, by and large, intimate and personal, gaming is a social experience. Many are not comfortable exploring their depths in the presence of others.

Also, If you have difficulty divorcing your faith from your gaming, Kult is definitely not for you. I have known people comfortable with Call of Cthulhu because its horrors were invented, but uncomfortable with Kult's open references to Satanism, or incorporation of genuine occult practices.

Further, it goes without saying that if you don't like to be made uncomfortable, you shouldn't be bothering with this game.

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